Have you ever wished your Hypervisor could be installed at the push of a button, without the tedious searching for the install CD and answering the same boring installation questions? HTG explains how to PXE an automated installation of Citrix-Xen.

Like in the Ubuntu live from FOG tutorial, the installation procedure isn’t purely PXE. It starts as PXE, as we provide the base “kernel”, “initial ram disk” (initrd) & other required files over PXE, but the rest of the procedure pulls the required files via HTTP.

Note: you may create as many directories as you wish. For example, I’ve had a directory for every major version of Citrix-Xen since v5.0.

Automated answers file (Optional)

This stage is marked as optional, because you may wish to not automate the installation. If you opt to not automate the procedure, you will have to answer the installation questions on your own with one noticeable difference: when prompted for the installation source, you would have to choose “HTTP” instead of “local media” and provide the address manually.

Just to keep the option of having the install CD mounted as a loopback device, we will put the answer file in the root of the webserver.

Where you would have to edit the IP to get the answer file to be your FOG’s IP.

Note: The “DEFAULT” and “PASSWD” directives are commented out because they don’t suit every situation. With that said, consider enabling them, because installing an OS could be really destructive if users get their hands on it…